Need overwhelms Housing Authority site

It's been at least three years since the Deerfield Beach Housing Authority had any money to add people to the Section 8 rental assistance program.

So when it reopened the program at 9 a.m. March 21, the inbox filled up fast.

One local applicant, Viola Moise, has been sharing a house with her husband and three children in Lauderhill, 18 miles from Deerfield Beach.

She travels here daily to work just five hours a day as a companion at Century Village, earning $10,000 last year. With a son in college and two children at home, she said, her house is in foreclosure.

"Things are not going well," Moise said. "We struggle."

So Moise was one of the applicants waiting when the Century Plaza branch of the Broward County Library opened at 10 a.m.

She registered for a computer and sat down at an available desk, but when she tried to log into the Housing Authority's website, she said, the site was having trouble accepting her application.

Others on online message boards cited similar problems that morning with the Housing Authority's website, which was overwhelmed with traffic.

"There are so many people losing their jobs, losing their house," Moise said.

Acting Housing Authority Executive Director Ranaldo Bennett said last week that 500 applications were received within half an hour of the application process opening.

"Our public notice said only the first 500 would be accepted, and we had that less than 30 minutes from the time it opened," he said.

The Deerfield Beach Housing Authority oversees 482 vouchers at any given time, but it has less than 80 slots left to fill.

Bennett said about 20 percent of the recent applicants will not meet the threshold for qualifying for funding. But with all the applications received, he said, he is certain all the slots will be filled.